Reel
by atypist
Summary: ...we have you listed as emergency contact for Robert O. Goren.
1. Injury

_**[prompt, Injury]**_

Phone. Oh good God, where's the damn phone. It's ringing and I'm sleeping, well not anymore. That is, I'm not sleeping because my phone is ringing and I realize as much as I would like to I probably shouldn't let it roll into voice mail.

"Eames." My voice is hoarse from sleep, so I clear it and repeat. "Eames."

"Alexandra Eames?" An unfamiliar female voice repeats back to me.

"Yes," I reply. T_hat's what I just said_. I'm sitting up in my bed now, completely awake. A stranger calling in the middle of the night referring to you by your full on proper name snaps a lot of focus into your brain.

"I have you listed as emergency contact information for…" She continues what she's saying but the adrenaline is buzzing in my ears so loudly that I cannot hear her. I swallow, hard. My mother? No, they would've called my father and he would've called me. My brother? No, he has a wife. My sister? No, same thing, she has a husband. "Ms. Eames?" the voice says.

"Yes. Could you repeat that please." I'm out of bed pulling on a pair of jeans and looking for a sweater.

"We have you listed as emergency contact for Robert O. Goren," she repeats what she said before, explaining that she's the ER admin, identifying the hospital. I'm now shoving my feet into my boots and running one of my hands through my hair, combing at it and tearing it out all in the same motion.

"I'm on my way," I say, my voice is hoarse again. "20 minutes." I figure, even with the sirens on, 20 minutes.

~tbc


	2. Thirteen

_**[prompt, Thirteen]**_

I make it to the ER in 13 minutes.

"Yes, um, I'm Detective Eames." Inexplicably, I flash my badge to the admin person. She looks at it and looks up at me. I appreciate that I'm not standing in the busy, bloody kind of ER that detectives tend to rush into flashing their badges. In fact, this particular ER is remarkably quiet. She looks at me for a long second, an infinite second.

"Oh, I just spoke with you on the phone," she reveals, almost causing me to jump over the desk and grab her by the throat. "You're the emergency contact for a _Robert O. Goren_."

"Apparently." I bite back the rest of my acerbic retort and do my damndest to stand still and let her finish whatever she was about to say.

"He's in exam 13." She presses a buzzer unlocking the heavy metal doors that lead back to the ER area. I don't say a word; I simply head back into the blinding, brightly lit area of the ER, blinking while my eyes struggle to adjust to the reflective surfaces.

"Ms. Eames?" A doctor about the age of a high school kid stops me at Exam 2, as I'm following the numbers back to exam 13.

"Yes," I say, suppressing the desire to correct him and have him call me detective.

He begins giving me a bunch of information I would've preferred to have had, as his emergency contact, after looking at _Robert O. Goren_. As it is, my brain is scrambling to digest what Doogie Houser is saying.

"I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" I'm starting to walk again, forcing him to walk with me.

"13 stitches, no sign of concussion..." The doctor keeps chattering while my brain desperately attempts to dissect the details of what he is saying.

"What?" I've stopped dead in my tracks. Not shot? Something about being called to the ER in the middle of the night for your partner makes you fairly convinced he's been shot.

* * *

_**[prompt, Oxygen]**_

"…no sign of concussion, but we'd like to keep him a while for observation," the doctor repeats to me for the third time. He's looking at me funny. "Ms. Eames…" he starts to say, but I cut him off.

"You're going to have to drop the whole _Ms. _thing. Detective, or Eames, or even Alex." My snappish off topic reply doesn't exactly alleviate the fact that he's looking at me strangely.

"Detective, do you need to sit down?" He at least changes from the Ms.

"No." I take a deep breath, which is the first time I've filled my lungs with oxygen since receiving the phone call. "I'm fine." I push through the curtain into the exam area.

Bobby is lying flat out on his back, his large frame dwarfing the exam table. His left arm is thrown up and over his eyes; he's stone cold still, his breathing shallow and even. Automatically, I start examining him almost as if he's a dead body on a slab, looking for evidence of what may have happened to land him in the ER in the middle of the night.

His forearms and palms are clear, no abrasions. If he took a fall, I'm wondering how he managed to split his head open without injuring his hands or his arms in the process. I cannot see his legs and knees; they are covered by a blanket. And since his arm is cast over his eyes, I cannot see if there are any additional injuries or bruises on his face. Quietly I move up and alongside the bed, trying to look at the backs of his hands. A fight maybe? Perhaps his knuckles are damaged.

"Eames." His voice is hoarse, and I startle as he brings me to the fact that he's quite alive and apparently awake.

* * *

_**[prompt, Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind]**_

"Yeah," I say, in response to my partner _Eamesing_ me. I watch him wince as he moves his arm away from his eyes, and move it right back again. The bright light ER light is a lot to take.

"How'd you get here?" His question seems less than relevant.

"Drove." I reply. "How'd you get here?" My question is more relevant.

"Um." Again he tries to move his arm away from his eyes, again he moves it back again. "Not sure."

Not a good sign, that he doesn't know how he got here. And actually, I have no clue how he got here either. I didn't think to ask and of course no one exactly offered.

"You have stitches in your head, no concussion." I repeat what I retained from the doctor's speech. "No injuries to your arms or hands, no additional injuries to your face, nothing on the backs of your hands either," I add my own observations. I watch him try to move, "and your back, looks like you've done something there."

"What're you doing here?"

"I'm your emergency contact," I supply moving around the bed to the other side of him to see if I can see anything that might clue me in as to what happened.

"Right." He slowly, almost delicately, moves his arm back down to his side. He keeps his eyes closed.

"What the hell Goren?" My mouth finally gets the best of me because I can't figure out what the fuck's going on.

~tbc


	3. without saying

_**[prompt, Say something you immediately regret]  
**_

I step backward as he slowly pushes himself to sitting, moving his legs to dangle off the edge of the exam table. My eyes automatically inspect his knees, where I can see asphalt ground into his jeans. So the head wound is from a fall, and he didn't brace with his hands. He simply fell to his knees?

"Maybe you should lie back down," I suggest, my eyes again darting for a doctor or a nurse.

"I'm okay." He's swaying slightly, and I'm still thinking it'd be good if he went back to lying down. That's when I realize he's not so much swaying as he's kind of heaving.

"Oh Christ, Goren." I mumble as I grab a trash can from the floor and shove it in front of him just as he wretches the contents of his stomach up and out. I immediately stop breathing from my nose, in fact, I straight on stop breathing. I leave the exam room and grab the young doctor no-name. "He just threw up," I say to the doctor, as if some gigantic misdiagnosis has occurred.

"I can see that." The doctor looks at me.

"Isn't that a sign of a concussion?" I ask, thinking the doctor is as stupid as he is young.

"He doesn't have a concussion," the doctor replies, and it slowly sinks in that the doctor is looking at me as if I'm as stupid as he is young.

I turn back to Goren, running down what's happening in my head. The middle of the night, in the ER, split his head open, didn't brace his fall, didn't want them to call me, puking, not a concussion. "You're…" I stop myself before I say the word, but the thought falls between us. I know, he knows that I know, and there's no taking it back.

"I didn't mean for them to call you," he mutters, without looking at me.

"I'm your emergency contact," I say the words again, turning them over in my head, getting used to the idea, finding it to be an important idea to get used to.


	4. symptom

**_[prompt, symptom]_**

Goren's surprised to see me sitting here. Hell, I'm sort of surprised to be sitting here. I'm not sure what he expected from me when I walked out of the ER exam area as he was heaving his guts out into the trash can I'd just handed him. It was easy enough for me to walk out, logistically anyway. A nurse was pushing in, and she pushed me out. How I felt about walking out is an entirely different story. Yet, I didn't find myself walking back in.

"Eames." He stops short and takes a side step. I stand, reminded at exactly how much larger he is than me. Kind of like his life, so much larger than mine. I have this way I step through things. I figure out how much I can take, and I take on exactly that much, maybe a bit more, leaving the margin of error just wide enough that I can handle it. I wonder if Goren has ever had the luxury of stepping through things. His life lands on him with a wallop. Sort of like I imagine his insight on the Job to be, like a kerthump to his brain.

"Ready?" I ask, like there was never any question I'd be standing there waiting for him.

"Yeah, um." He has a fistful of discharge papers. "They discharged me." He doesn't say anything about being read.

"Can you walk?" I ask, looking at him. A reasonable question given the fact that he was so drunk he apparently tripped and fell and split his head open. So he stands, feet planted kind of wide apart, 13 stitches later and not actually sober.

"Yes." And he has the nerve to sound pissy.

"Let's go then." I stare at him until he proves that he can walk. He's slow, but walking.

"I didn't mean for them to call you," he reminds me as he slides into his position in the passenger seat.

I don't look in his direction. He doesn't say anything more. I think about pointing out that maybe he should call me, maybe he should call me before he takes a header. Though I know he won't call me, and I know there'll be a next time. I'm not quite certain of my part in this, but I'm certain it's going to play.


End file.
